North America

Intercontinental Exchange, the US based exchange and clearing business, has made main board appointments and named a new chairperson for the board of its ICE Clear Europe subsidiary.

Indexes that invest in options strategies have historically generated better returns and lower volatility than other key stock, bond and commodity benchmarks, according to a study backed by the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

US car rental provider Avis this week followed rival Hertz to the euro market and sold a €300m bond, increasing the deal from its initially marketed size.

National Bank of Canada issued a rare seven year euro covered bond on Thursday and although it offered virtually no concession, it was highly subscribed, despite secondary market profit-taking.

Jean-Pierre Mustier, chief executive of UniCredit, told GlobalCapital that US regulators do not really want foreign banks to have big operations in their domestic market, and he pointed to the unequal treatment of European banks in the US compared with US banks in Europe.

The US is one step closer to becoming a renminbi hub with Bank of China New York officially appointed as the country’s first RMB clearing bank, a major development towards the internationalisation of the currency.

Synechron, a technology services provider, is targeting margin calls as one of six ‘blockchain accelerator’ applications for the financial markets.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has penalised Russia’s VTB Bank and its London-based VTB Capital investment banking subsidiary over what the Commission called "fictitious" and "non-competitive" block trades of Russian ruble/US dollar futures contracts.

ICE Clear Europe, the European clearing arm of Intercontinental Exchange, has been authorised by the Bank of England and by the European Securities and Markets Authority as a central counterparty (CCP).

Industry-wide collaboration on distributed ledger technology governance is needed and policymakers must plan ahead for the impact of such advances on securities markets and post-trade infrastructures, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation has said.

Derivatives market participants must embrace new technologies to meet the challenges it faces in seeking greater standardisation and efficiency, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association has said. These include opportunities for use of blockchain, ‘RegTech’, product identifiers and ‘common domain models’.

Deutsche Bank is at real risk of failing to pay coupons on its additional tier one instruments, as a potential $14bn US RMBS settlement threatens to erase the bank's available distributable items (ADIs). Outstanding DB AT1 securities reacted accordingly last Friday, shooting nearly 200bp wider.